5 Google Analytics Alternatives that Focus on User-Privacy

While Google Analytics has been the industry standard for tracking for over decade a new wave of privacy-focused analytics are popping up. Many users want to leave the bloat of Google Analytics and the privacy implications so we’ve compiled this list of 5 privacy-focused Google Analytics alternatives.

But first let’s go over some reasons why you wouldn’t want to use Google Analytics.

Reasons NOT to use Google Analytics

• ⚡ Performance: Google Analytics’ tracker can be upwards of 70 kb+ which can affect your page speed score (ironically). Trackers on this list have much smaller footprints (~2 kb) since they capture less information about the user.
• 🔒 User’s Privacy: You can are about your user’s privacy.
• 😨 Complicated Interface: While Google Analytics tracks almost everything from your visitors if you aren’t an expert looking at.
• 🥴 Transition to GA4: With Google Analytics 4 becoming the default and Universal Analytics being phased out this gives an even bigger reason to move analytics platforms.

Most of the privacy-focused alternatives are GDPR and Cookie Directive compliant since they don’t track user data. Since these platforms don’t profit off your data they have a subscription cost. On the other hand Google uses data from your sites to fuel their DoubleClick business and profile your users.

Let’s just hop into our list of privacy-focused Google Analytics alternatives:

1. Fathom

One of the most popular privacy-focused analytics platforms is Fathom. Fathom includes all of your basic analytics needs like top pages, referrers, country, browser, device, and goals.

Best of all they have an official WordPress plugin to easily set up Fathom.

UseFathom.com – $14/m

2. Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics are some of the simplest analytics you can get (hence the name of the service). Optionally you can make your analytics information public, we use it on SmartWP and you can see our public page here.

Of course they also have a WordPress plugin to quickly set it up.

SimpleAnalytics.com – $9/m

3. Cloudflare Analytics

Cloudflare is starting to become a big player in the analytics field. If you use them for your DNS/CDN you may already have access to their new analytics functionality. Cloudflare prides itself on being privacy and performance focused and their analytics features are no exception.

Cloudflare.com/analytics – Free

4. Plausible

Plausible.io is a lightweight and open-source alternative to Google Analytics. Best of all it’s fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. That means no more cookie notices and full privacy-forward features for your visitors.

Plausible.io – $9/m

5. Matomo

One of the more unique options for a Google Analytics alternative is Matomo. They offer an open source analytics platform that you can host yourself for free. Most users will likely want to just use their hosting, which is $19/month but it’s good to know you have ownership over your data and the ability to host it yourself (must like WordPress).

Matomo.com – Self-Hosted Free, Hosted $23/m

I hope you enjoyed our breakdown of privacy focuses Google Analytics alternatives.